Most cookbooks begin with the promise of transporting the reader to a happy place. Yasmin Khan’s new cookbook, Zaitoun: Recipes From the Palestinian Kitchen, begins by transporting the reader to the Tel Aviv airport interrogation rooms where Khan, a Briton of Iranian-Pakistani heritage, was questioned for several hours after flying into Israel.

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“I just decided I needed to tell the truth,” Khan says about her cookbook’s introduction. “I thought it was important for me to start the book with that because we do live in context; while Israeli food is booming, this other side isn’t represented.”

Zaitoun, which was published yesterday in the US,is the newest of a recent crop of Palestinian cookbooks attempting to remedy that, including the London-based Palestinian chef Joudie Kalla’s 2016 Palestine on a Plate and The Palestinian Table, a 2017 volume from Reem Kassis, a Philadelphia-based Palestinian cookbook author. It reads as much as the story of the Palestinian people as their food, interweaving the anecdotes of home cooks and professional chefs with more than 80 recipes.

The book’s chapters are organized by course, interspersed with stories about Palestinian culture. In the first chapter, Khan explores mezze, the vivid, often plant-based dishes associated with the Galilee; it includes three recipes for hummus, a rich shakshuka, various flatbreads, and a salad that teams salty halloumi with orange, dates and pomegranate seeds. From the West Bank, Khan showcases gutsy stews, breads, and meat dishes influenced by both Bedouin and Jordanian cooking; the main courses chapter includes a recipe for mussakhan, a concoction of roast chicken seasoned with sumac and served with caramelized onions over taboon flatbread, one of the national dishes of Palestine. The food of Gaza, which Khan couldn’t visit due to the blockade that cuts it off from the rest of Palestine, is meanwhile bright with fresh dill, green chilies and garlic, all of which find happy expression in a spicy shrimp and tomato stew recipe.

But for all of its vibrancy, Gazan food is also in danger of extinction: the blockade, as Khan writes, has plunged the region into food poverty and is eradicating its once-thriving fishing industry.

Writing about Gazan cooking was just one of the challenges specific to writing about food in a place of conflict; it is impossible to talk about Palestinian cuisine, Khan learned, without acknowledging the effects of the Israeli occupation. As one woman angrily told her: “We are not clowns in a circus for you to come and watch and make research notes about and then make your name from writing down our suffering.”

“It was just really hard,” Khan, 37, says of figuring out how to strike a balance between depicting Palestinian food and the realities informing it. “I had this idea of, OK, I’m going to go write a cookbook and describe the situation, but it had been five years since I’d been and had forgotten the intensity and the trauma.”

After her first research trip in 2016, Khan came back “completely unsure if I could do the book”, she admits with the thoughtful candor that characterizes her writing. “I didn’t know how I could accurately represent the really painful situations I’d witnessed. Writing a cookbook felt so trite.”

But not long into the almost year-and-a-half-long process of researching and writing Zaitoun, Khan realized that she could use the book as a window into what she had seen. “I felt it was quite important to include these challenging voices,” she says. “It was very important to me to have Palestinians in their own voices sharing how their lives are, but it was challenging.”

Khan covered similarly daunting territory with her first cookbook, The Saffron Tales. Published in 2016, it is a vibrant compilation of recipes and stories from another widely misunderstood place: Iran, the country where Khan’s mother grew up and many of her relatives still live. “I came to realize after the success of The Saffron Talesthat there was a powerful role that food could play in exploring countries in the Middle East,” Khan says. “And I also think I stepped into more what I think is now my mission of challenging stereotypes of the Middle East.”

It’s a mission that Khan has on some level been preparing for her entire life. Born in London, she was just three months old when her mother, who was working on her PhD in nutrition, took her to Iran to conduct field research. Then the Iran-Iraq war happened, and the borders closed. She and her mother stayed in Iran for a few years, before reuniting with her father in the UK. The family settled in Birmingham when Khan was six.

At various points during the eight-year war, Khan returned to Iran with her mother despite the tumult there. “It was a very intense time, but we kept going back,” she says. She had close family members who were jailed or executed, and remembers sneaking snacks to her imprisoned uncle on Nowruz and then milking cows on her grandparents’ rice farm.

“A psychologist probably wouldn’t take much to realize that my childhood, and seeing the backdrop of Iran and the horrors unfolding there led me to do a law degree with a view to being a human rights lawyer,” Khan says with a laugh. She became a human rights campaigner for a decade, eventually succumbing to career fatigue in 2013. As she pondered what to do next, she got the idea to write what would become The Saffron Tales, funding her first research trip to Iran through a successful Kickstarter campaign. “There was a huge gap in the market for Iranian cookbooks,” she says. “But more than that, there were no nuanced depictions of Iran other than what you’d see in the news.”

As The Saffron Talesearned critical acclaim, Khan quickly came upon the idea for her follow-up. During her last few years in the non-profit sector, she had traveled throughout Israel and the West Bank as part of her NGO work on Israeli-Palestinian relations – “It probably caused my burnout,” she says wryly. But the food and flavors were familiar to her, and Khan saw an opportunity to explore another place that, like Iran, “is often narrowly seen through a political prism”.

Khan’s heritage and human rights work have earned her the respect of a number of Palestinian chefs, many of whom have had to endure their share of stereotypes, even as they have watched attitudes towards Palestinians begin to shift over the years. In 1998, when Rawia Bishara opened Tanoreen, her Middle Eastern restaurant in Brooklyn, “there was this overwhelming idea that all Palestinians are terrorists and they carry the guns”, says Bishara, who immigrated to the US from Nazareth in 1974. When she told her early customers she was from Palestine, many of them thought she was from Pakistan. “Every time I said ‘Palestine’, they said, ‘Pakistan’,” she recalls.

But now, Bishara adds, “they realize we are a whole culture; we don’t come from 1948 [the year the state of Israel was created]. We come from awhile before that.”

Reem Assil, chef-owner of the Oakland restaurants Dyafa and Reem’s California, met Khan when they sat on a panel about cultural appropriation at the 2017 Cherry Bombe Jubilee, a conference for women in food. “[Khan’s] book humanizes Palestinians,” Assil says of Zaitoun, which was first published in the UK last July. The pair will host a dinner showcasing the book’s recipes during the Bay Area leg of Khan’s upcoming book tour.

“I think talking about the conflict is not a bad thing,” Assil says of Khan’s decision to juxtapose it with beautiful photos of delicious food. “When you talk about the conflict you talk about the resilience of people. I’m speaking as a Palestinian now – when we talk about any subject related to our culture or upbringing, for better or worse the war and all these things are so normalized.”

Khan, she adds, “is going in there and keeping people’s memories fresh and alive, and talking about the origin and evolution of the food is part of that. We don’t have to shy away from politics. As a reader, you’re partaking in that by buying the book and cooking that food.”

Khan herself has been pleasantly surprised by the book’s reception in the UK, just as she was by The Saffron Tale’s. “A few people have written saying they’ve been moved to tears by the book, which I think is unusual for a cookbook,” she says. “That’s one of the things I’m most proud of.”

Last September, Khan posted photos to Instagram from another place shaped by conflict: a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. When asked if her visit had anything to do with an upcoming project, she demurs. “I can’t really talk about my next book publicly yet, but you can take from that what you want,” she says. “But I think going forward I’m really committed to continuing to do what I can to use the power of story and cookery to shine a light on places of conflict.”

Remove the segments from the orange: slice the top and bottom off the fruit, cutting deep enough that you see a wheel of orange flesh on both sides. Place the fruit on one of its flat ends, then slice off the remaining peel and pith, following the contour of the fruit. To remove individual segments, insert your knife as close as you can to the inside membrane of each segment and cut to the core. Do this on both sides of the segment; it should release with no pith.

Heat a large frying pan over a medium heat. Add the cooking oil if you need to; this will depend on the quality of your pan. Cook the halloumi on both sides until golden brown, then transfer to a serving plate.

Scatter the orange segments, dates and pomegranate seeds over the warm cheese. Mix the extra virgin olive oil and pomegranate molasses in a small bowl and drizzle this over before finishing with a smattering of mint. Serve immediately.

Then add the tomatoes, sugar, spices and 1/2 teaspoon each salt and pepper, with 3/4 cup just-boiled water.

Smash the garlic, dill, chillies and 1/2 teaspoon salt together in a mortar and pestle for a few minutes. This releases the oils from the chillies and herbs and makes them more fragrant. Add to the tomato pan, cover and simmer for 20 minutes over a low heat.

Meanwhile, toast the sesame seeds by placing them in a dry pan and stirring over a medium heat for a few minutes until they turn golden brown. Remove from the pan and set aside.

When the sauce is ready, taste and adjust the seasoning (you may want to add a pinch more sugar or a bit more chili). Finally, add the shrimp – making sure they are submerged and turning them if necessary – cooking for about two minutes, or until they have just turned pink and are cooked through.

To serve, drizzle with a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil and scatter with the sesame seeds and chopped parsley.